Your checkout should ask shoppers only for what matters to them, at the moment it matters. Version 8.0 of Simple Checkout Fields Manager for WooCommerce adds a whole new batch of conditions you can use to show, hide, or require fields, so your checkout can react to almost anything happening in the cart.
Quica has spent the past few weeks parked in front of the settings screen, watching the new dropdown options scroll by like it’s the most fascinating thing she’s ever seen (high praise, from a cat who considers a sunbeam a full-time job). Maria mostly tried to help by walking across the keyboard mid-testing, which, to be fair, is basically what QA is.
New conditions for your checkout logic
Since version 5.0, you’ve been able to show or hide fields based on things like payment method or product category. With 8.0, the list of “if this, then that” triggers keeps growing:
- Order totals, with or without tax. Previously you could only check the order total with tax included. Now you can also base a rule on the order total without tax, or on the products-only sub-total, with or without tax. Useful if you want a rule to react purely to what’s in the cart, regardless of shipping costs or taxes.
- Shipping method. Show a pickup-instructions field only when a local pickup method is selected, or request an access code only for methods that need one. Picked straight from your store’s shipping zones, so there’s nothing to configure elsewhere.
- Total quantity in cart and number of different products. These are two different things, and now you can use either one. A cart with 2 of product A and 3 of product B has a quantity of 5, but only 2 different products. Maria insists this is basically the difference between “how many treats” and “how many types of treats,” and honestly, we can’t argue with that logic.
- Specific products, searched on the fly. Show a field only when a particular product is in the cart. This works even on stores with thousands of products, since it searches as you type instead of loading your whole catalog into a dropdown. Pick a variable product itself and the rule matches any of its variations; pick one specific variation and only that one matches.
Combine any of these with the AND/OR rule groups you already know, and you can build checkout logic as specific as your business needs it to be, still without touching a line of code.
A friendlier “Pattern” field
If you use the “Pattern” advanced option to validate a custom field with a regular expression, you no longer have to write one from scratch. A new dropdown next to the field offers common, tested patterns (numbers only, letters only, email, URL, phone, minimum length) that you can insert with one click, and it stays in sync if you edit the pattern by hand afterward.
Documentation that actually explains itself
We rewrote a good chunk of the documentation and FAQ page for this release. The getting started guide is clearer about what the three field sections and four field types actually are, the “which section should each field go in” answer now covers more real-world examples, and the conditional rules FAQ was fully checked against the plugin’s code and rewritten to list every condition and operator that’s actually available, instead of drifting out of date as the feature grew.
Under the hood
A few smaller, more technical changes came along for the ride:
- The legacy fields migration routine (the one that runs when upgrading from a very old version) is now hardened against unsafe data, closing off a theoretical object injection vector.
- A long-standing WooCommerce bug where a field’s validation could misfire for conditionally shown fields is confirmed fixed as of WooCommerce 10.0, and our own documentation and code comments now say so instead of still warning about it.
- License activation errors are now surfaced as a proper on-screen notice instead of a generic browser alert.
- The plugin’s minimum requirements move up to PHP 7.4, WordPress 6.4, and WooCommerce 9.0, and it has been tested against the upcoming WordPress 7.1 and WooCommerce 11.0.
- A settings page bug that kept re-rendering the page after saving general settings is fixed, and a leftover debug output that ran on every page load has been removed.
- Behind the scenes, our release process itself got an upgrade: shared GitHub Actions now handle building the release zip, generating the store’s changelog, and deploying documentation updates, so new versions reach you faster and with fewer manual steps.
Tested to purr-fection by Quica and Maria, who signed off on this release the same way they sign off on everything: by falling asleep on top of the keyboard the moment we hit save.
Ready to put your checkout to work?
Version 8.0 of Simple Checkout Fields Manager for WooCommerce is available now. Visit the plugin page to see everything it can do, or check the documentation page (linked from there) for the full list of conditions and operators.
And remember, Quica and Maria are always watching over your checkout experience. No bugs, only purrs.
